Even leaving its grandeur and beauty aside, the Sun is the most distant part of the universe which Man can descry, and hence so little known that those who fell into reverent ecstasies before it were excusable.
[C] Thales201 was the first to inquire into such matters: he thought God was. Spirit who made all things out of water; Anaximander said that the gods are born and die with the seasons and that there are worlds infinite in number; Anaximenes said God was Air, immense, extensive, ever moving; Anaxagoras was the first to hold that the delineation and fashioning of all things was directed by the might and reason of an infinite Spirit; Alcmaeon attributed Godhead to the Sun, the Moon, the stars and to the soul; Pythagoras made God into a Spirit diffused throughout all nature and from whom our souls are detached; for Parmenides God was a circle of light surrounding the heavens and sustaining the world with its heat; Empedocles made gods from the four natural elements of which all things are compounded; Protagoras would not say whether the gods existed or not or what they are if they do; Democritus sometimes asserted that the constellations and their circular paths were gods, sometimes that God was that Nature whose impulse first made them move; then he said our knowledge and our intellect were God; Plato’s beliefs are diffuse and many-sided: in the Timaeus he says that the Father of the world cannot be named; in the Laws he forbids all inquiry into the proper being of God: elsewhere, in these very same books, he makes the world, the sky, the heavenly bodies, the earth and our souls into gods, recognizing as well all the gods accepted by ancient custom in every country. Xenophon records a similar confusion in the teachings of Socrates: sometimes he has Socrates maintaining that no inquiry should be made into the properties of God; at other times he has him deciding that the Sun is God, that the soul is God, that there is only one God and then that there are many. The nephew of Plato, Speusippus, holds God to be a certain animate Power governing all things; Aristotle sometimes says that God is Mind and sometimes the World; at times he gives the world a different Master and sometimes makes a god from the heat of the sky. Zenocrates has eight gods: five are named after the planets; the sixth has all the fixed stars as his members, the seventh and eighth being the Sun and Moon. Heraclides of Pontus meanders along beneath these various notions and ends up with. God deprived of all sensation; he has him changing from one form to another and finally asserts that he is heaven and earth. Theophrastus is similarly undecided, wandering about between his many concepts, attributing the government of the world sometimes to Intelligence, sometimes to the sky and sometimes to the stars; Strato says God is Nature, giving birth, making things wax and wane, but itself formless and insensate; Zeno makes a god of Natural Law: it commands good, forbids evil and is animate; he dismisses the gods accepted by custom –Jupiter, Juno and Vesta; Diogenes of Apollonia says God is Time. Xenophanes makes God round, able to see and hear but not to breathe and having nothing in common with human nature; Ariston thinks that the form of God cannot be grasped: he deprives him of senses and cannot tell whether he is animate or something quite different. For Cleanthes God is sometimes Reason, sometimes the World, sometimes the Soul of Nature, sometimes absolute Heat surrounding and enveloping all things. Perseus, a pupil of Zeno’s, maintained that the name god was bestowed on people who had contributed some outstandingly useful improvements to the life of Man – or even on the improvements themselves. Chrysippus made a chaotic mass of all these assertions and included among his thousand forms of gods men who had been immortalized. Diagoras and Theodorus bluntly denied that gods exist. Epicurus has shiny gods, permeable to wind and light, who are lodged between two worlds which serve as fortresses protecting them from being battered; they are clothed in human shape, with limbs like ours which are quite useless.
Ego deûm genus esse semper duxi, et dicam coelitum;
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus.
[Personally I have always thought, and will always say, that a race of gods exists in heaven. But I do not think that they care about the actions of the human race.]202
So much din from so many philosophical brainboxes! Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!
I have drawn some profit from the confusion of forms in the customs of the world: manners and concepts different from mine do not so much annoy me as instruct me; comparing them does not puff me up with pride but humbles me. There is for me no such thing as a privileged choice, except one coming expressly from the hand of God.
I shall not go into monstrous and unnatural vice but on that subject the legislatures of this world are no less contradictory than the rival schools of philosophy. From that we can learn that Fortune herself is not more varied, fickle, blind and ill-advised than human reason.
[A] Things we know least about are the ones we find most proper to deify.203 [C] Making gods of men [A] as Antiquity did surpasses even the most extreme imbecility of reason. I would rather have followed those who worship the serpent, the dog and the bull; since the natures of such animals are less known to us, we are free to imagine them as we like and to endow them with extraordinary qualities. But the Ancients attributed to their gods our own condition – the imperfections of which we ought to know; they gave them desire, wrath, acts of vengeance, marriages, powers of generation and family trees, love, jealousy, bones and limbs like ours, our own feverish passions and pleasures, [C] our deaths and funerals. [A] The human intellect must have been astonishingly drunk to produce all that!
[B] Quae procul usque adeo divino ab numine distant,
Inque Deum numero quae sint indigna videri.
[Things far removed from numinous deity, unworthy to appear among the Gods.]
[C] ‘Formae, aetates, vestitus, ornatus noti sunt; genera, conjugia, cognationes omniaque traducta ad similitudinem imbecillitatis humanae: nam et perturbatis animis inducuntur; accipimus enim deorum cupiditates, aegritudines, iracundias’ [We know their faces, their ages, their vestments and their adornments. Their families, their marriages and their kinships are all reduced to the model of human weakness. They are even given troubled minds. We hear of the desires of the gods, of their sicknesses and of their fits of anger].
[A] Similarly they made gods [C] not only of Faith, Virtue, Honour, Concord, Freedom, Victory, Piety, but even of Pleasure, Fraud, Death, Envy, Old Age and Misery, [A] of Fear, Fever, Ill-Fortune and the other evils which beset our fragile and decaying lives:
[B] Quid juvat hoc, templis nostros inducere mores?
O curvae in terris animae et coelestium inanes!
[What pleasure can be found from introducing our manners into our temples? O souls bowed earthwards, entirely void of things celestial!]204
[C] With what unwise wisdom did the Egyptians forbid, under pain of hanging, that anyone should let it be known that their Gods Serapis and Isis had once been human: everybody knew then that they had been so! According to Varro effigies of these Gods were carved with their fingers on their lips to signify this mysterious command to their priests to hush up their mortal origins (otherwise all worship of them would inevitably be brought to naught).205
[A] Since man was so desirous of making himself the equal of God, it would have been better, said Cicero, to bring the properties of God down to earth and to turn them into human attributes rather than to send our wretchedness and corruption up to heaven.206 But if you look at it aright, equally vain opinions have led Man, in various ways, to do both.
When philosophers go into the hierarchy of their gods and rush to distinguish the alliances, attributes and powers of each of them, I cannot believe they are serious.
When Plato deciphered for us the myth of the ‘Orchard of Dis’207 telling us of the physical pleasures and pains awaiting us (after our bodies have decayed into nothing!); when he associated them with sensations experienced in this present life –
Secreti celant calles, et myrtea circum
Sylva tegit; curae non ipsa in morte relinquunt.
[They hide away in
secret glades, screened by myrtle groves on every side; even when dead their troubles do not leave them] –
and when Mahomet promised his followers a paradise decked out with tapestries and carpets, with ornaments of gold and precious stones, furnished with voluptuous nymphs of outstanding beauty, with wines and choice foods to eat: I realized that they were both laughing at us, stooping low to tempt our brutish stupidity with sweet allurements, enticing us with notions and hopes appropriate to our mortal appetites.
[C] Even some of our Christians have fallen into a similar error, promising themselves an earthly life after our resurrection, a life within time, accompanied by all kinds of worldly pleasures and comforts. [A] Plato’s thoughts were all of heaven; his familiarity with things divine was so great that the surname Divine has clung to him ever since;208 are we to believe that even he thought there was, in a wretched creature like Man, something able to approach such incomprehensible Power? Did he believe that we, with our feeble grasp, could actually have a share in eternal blessedness or reprobation, or that our senses were robust enough to do so?209
This is what we ought to say to him, on behalf of human reason:
If the pleasures you offer me in the next life are related to ones I have experienced here on earth, that can have nothing to do with the Infinite. Even if my five natural senses were overwhelmed with joy; even if this soul of mine were seized of all the happiness she could ever hope for or desire, we know her limitations:210 that would amount to nothing. Where there remains anything of mine, there is nothing divine. If your promises merely relate to what can exist in our present condition, they cannot enter into the reckoning. [C] All the pleasures of mortals are mortal. [A] Take recognizing parents, children and friends in the next world: if that can touch us and titillate us, if we grasp at such pleasures as that, then we still remain within earthbound,211 finite pleasures. We cannot condignly conceive those high, divine promises if we are able to conceive them at all. To imagine them condignly, we must imagine them unimaginable, unutterable, incomprehensible [C] and entirely different from our own wretched experiences. [A] ‘Eye cannot see’, says St Paul, ‘nor can there rise up in the heart of man, what God has prepared for his own.’212 And if (as you assert, Plato, with your ‘purifications’) we have to modify our being in order to render ourselves capable of celestial joy, that would mean a change so extreme and so total that (as we know from Physics) we would cease to be ourselves:
[B] Hector erat tunc cum bello certabat; at ille,
Tractus ab Aemonio, non erat Hector, equo.
[Hector was killed in battle: but it was not Hector who was dragged along by Achilles’ horse.]
[A] Something else would receive our rewards.
[B] quod mutatur, dissolvitur; interit ergo:
Trajiciuntur enim partes atque ordine migrant.
[When what is changed is loosened asunder, that is death. The elements are displaced and change their ordered places.]213”
[A] Pythagoras thought up his metempsychosis in which souls change their dwelling-places: are we to think that the lion which is now housing the soul of Caesar has espoused the passions which moved Caesar, [C] or that it really is Caesar? And if it really were Caesar, then victory would lie with those who opposed Plato over this opinion, pointing out, among other absurdities, that a son might well find himself astride his mother, now clothed in the body of a mule.214
Do we doubt [A] that, in such transmigrations as may take place within the same species, the newcomers are different from their forebears? They say that from the ashes of the Phoenix there is born first a worm and then another Phoenix; can anyone think that the second Phoenix is no different from the first? The worm which produces silk for us can be seen dying and shrivelling up: then, from that same body a butterfly appears; that produces another worm: it would be absurd to think it was still the first one. That which once ceases to be no longer exists.
Nec si materiam nostram collegerit aetas
Post obitum, rursumque redegerit, ut sita nunc est,
Atque iterum nobis fuerint data lumina vitae,
Pertineat quidquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum,
Interrupta semel cum sit repetentia nostra.
[If Time, after we are dead, should gather our matter together and make it as it now is; if the light of life were again granted to us – even that would not concern us, once the thread of our memory has been snapped asunder.]
You assert somewhere or other, Plato, that rewards in the life to come concern the spiritual part of man, but that remains just as unlikely.
[B] Scilicet, avolsis radicibus, ut nequit ullam
Dispicere ipse oculus rem, seorsum corpore toto.
[For an eye torn from its socket and removed from its body can see nothing whatsoever.]
[A] By your reckoning, it would no longer be Man who is touched by such Joy – no longer us: for we are built of two principal parts, which together form our being; to separate them is death and the collapse of our being.
[B] Inter enim jecta est vitai pausa, vageque
Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.
[For life has been interrupted. No motions can affect our senses now; they are quite lost.]
When the limbs a man had in life are eaten by worms and turning to dust we never say that the man is feeling pain:
Et nihil hoc ad nos, qui coitu conjugioque
Corporis atque animae consistimus uniter apti.
[That is nothing to us. We are a union formed from the marriage and embrace of body and soul.]215
Moreover, what just grounds do the gods have for noting and rewarding, after death, a man’s good, virtuous deeds? Within that man it is the gods themselves who nurtured and produced them. And why are the gods offended by his vicious deeds? Why do they punish them? They themselves brought him forth in this faulty state; with a mere nod of their will they can prevent his failure.216
Surely Epicurus, with every appearance of human rationality, could have raised such objections to Plato, [C] had he not already covered himself by his oft-repeated conclusion: ‘From mortal nature nothing certain can be inferred about the Immortal.’
[A] Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine. Who knows that better than we do? For we have supplied Reason with principles which are certain and infallible; we light her steps with the holy lamp of that Truth which God has been pleased to impart to us; yet we can see, every day, that as soon as she is allowed to deviate, however slightly, from the normal path, turning and straying from the beaten track traced for us by the Church, she immediately stumbles and becomes inextricably lost; she whirls aimlessly about, bobbing unchecked on the huge, troubled, surging sea of human opinion. As soon as she misses that great public highway she disintegrates and scatters in hundreds of different directions.
Man cannot be other than he is; he cannot have thoughts beyond his reach. [B] Plutarch says that it is greater arrogance for mere men to start talking and arguing about gods and demi-gods than for a man who knows nothing whatever about music to start criticizing singers, or for a man who has never been on a battlefield to try and argue about arms and war, from some trivial conjecture presuming to understand an art which far exceeds his knowledge.217
[A] I believe that, in the Ancient World, men thought they were actually enhancing the greatness of God when they made him equal to Man, clothed him with Man’s faculties and made him a present of Man’s fair humours [C] and even of his most shameful necessities; [A] they offered him our food to eat, [C] our dances, mummeries and farces to amuse him; [A] our vestments to clothe him and our houses to dwell in, courting him with odours of incense, sounds of music and garlands of flowers; [C] they made him conform to our own vicious passions, subverting his justice in the name of inhuman vengeance, causing him to rejoice in the smashing and wasting of the very things he had created and protected (as Tiberius Sempronius did when he made a burned sacrifice to Vulcan of the arms and treasures seized as b
ooty from his enemies in Sardinia; as Paul Aemilius did, when he sacrificed the spoils of Macedonia to Mars and Minerva, and as Alexander did, when he reached the shores of the Indian Ocean and sought the favour of Thetis by casting many huge golden jars into the sea).218 More. They loaded his altars with butchered carcasses – not only of innocent beasts but of men, [A] following the established custom of many peoples – including our own; no nation, I believe, is exempt: all have assayed it.
[B] Sulmone creatos
Quattuor hic juvenes, totidem quos educat Ufens,
Viventes rapit, inferias quos immolet umbris.
[He took alive four young men, begot by Sulmo, and another four bred by Ufens, to immolate them as sacrifices to the Shades.]219
[C] The Getae think they are immortal; for them, dying is but a journey to their God Zamolxis. Every five years they dispatch one of their number to him to ask for what they need. The ambassador is chosen by lot. The actual dispatching takes this form: the man is told of his charge by word of mouth; three of those present hold three javelins upright, the others toss the man on to them. If some vital organ is impaled and he dies at once, that is a clear indication of divine approval. If he escapes death, he is thought to be evil and accursed, so another ambassador is similarly dispatched.